King Kong Un 最近的評論

Most of the city building community has now moved on to Cities: Skylines. Here is why SimCity 4 is not only still relevant, but a game I actually prefer to Cities: Skylines.

First off, SimCity 4 is actually challenging. A city is neither guaranteed to expand endlessly or generate a profit. It does so by the careful planning of zones, road layouts, and public transportation. Residents settle in and generate traffic that clogs streets, waste that piles up in front yards, and electrical and water shortages that test infrastructure. Newer residents don’t come -- unless you deal with these layered problems. In this way, every additional thousand residents is the reward to a self-reinventing challenge.

Compare this to the challenges of Cities Skylines, most of which involve working around the game’s flawed design. You start out with a bundle of cash and the only thing you need to do is not spend yourself into a hole. This is how newer players can ruin their cities before they even start. By putting down too many roads or placing too many electrical pylons, if they spend too much money before the city can accumulate taxes from its population, the city will never generate a profit and will always fail. If they can avoid that, the difficulty is smooth sailing thereafter. No matter how badly you manage taxes or spending, cities always seem to generate bountiful profit.

Then there is the main challenge of Cities: Skylines: traffic management. Much of the difficulty comes from a lack of options in the vanilla game, including not being able to control when an intersection has traffic lights. Also, merging is broken. Sometimes miles before turning or exiting, cars will drive onto roads and immediately stick to the right lane, massive and outrageous one-lane pileups will ensue, and your city will suck.

Mods will fix many of these issues, and in that respect, nothing beats Cities: Skylines. But if you’re like me and never did much with mods, instead finding it much more rewarding to watch any of the hundreds of Cities: Skylines youtube videos featuring impeccably detailed cities, then that craving is dead. What mods won’t fix is the earlier merging problem. Nothing will, until Paradox releases Cities: Skylines 2 with an improved engine.

One thing stands: this isn’t smart game design. If the most challenging aspect of the game is also its most broken part, the only solution is to turn it off -- or play SimCity 4. And SimCity 4 has a lot to offer: a socio-economic simulation, poor sims and their junkers, towering affordable housing projects, stuck-up wealthy sims, private schools and country clubs, advisers that berate you for every problem under the sun, a Dr. Vu who promises black money and whispers evils into your ear, life-size agricultural fields, a space program, hi-tech research facilities, alien invasions, meteor strikes, city-swallowing volcanoes and violent tornadoes. You can’t get that with Cities: Skylines.